PERFECTING THE RECIPE

Todd Graves, the founder and owner of Raising Cane's, is seeing just how far the company can go by doing one thing well. This year, it's on track to exceed $5 billion in sales—and he's just getting started.

- ROB WALKER

Raising Cane's was already having a banner 2025 when founder Todd Graves got some surprising news: The chicken finger chain had surpassed KFC in annual U.S. sales, making it the number-three quick-serve chicken chain, behind Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. Even Graves, who is not lacking in self-confidence when it comes to his business, was momentarily given pause. “Wait, what?” he remembers thinking. Outselling Colonel Sanders? The worldwide brand we all grew up with? “We're bigger than them in the U.S.?”

Graves couldn’t have been that surprised, though. We're speaking in a dining room in his 5,500-square-foot guesthouse, decorated like a stylish hotel, in a tony Baton Rouge, Louisiana, neighborhood. Through a window, you can see the 53-year-old’s custom-built, $400,000 treehouse. This year, Raising Cane’s revenue is expected to exceed last year’s total of $5.1 billion (more than double what it was in 2021). It’s also adding close to 100 new locations to bring its total to nearly 1,000 in 43 states. Cane’s restaurants have an average unit volume of nearly $6.6 million, more than double the fast-food chicken restaurant average. Apply that unit volume across 1,000 locations and Cane’s could be on pace to exceed $6 billion in sales next year.

The chain’s cultural profile has soared too. Celebrity endorsers and fans—“Caniacs,” as devotees are called—now include the likes of Cardi B, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, and Eli Manning. Jessica Alba and Kevin Hart were among those spotted in the Raising Cane’s suite at this year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans, where the Louisiana-born Graves was on the host committee. Also this year, the company announced it would open a U.K. flagship in London in 2026, the first of several locations in the country and part of a broader international push. On its most recent billionaires list, Forbes estimated that Graves’s 92 percent ownership of Raising Cane’s pushed his net worth to $22 billion.